Transpoetic Exchange illuminates the poetic interactions between Octavio Paz (1914-1998) and Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003) from three perspectives--comparative, theoretical, and performative. The poem Blanco by Octavio Paz, written when he was ambassador to India in 1966, and Haroldo de Campos’ translation (or what he calls a “transcreation”) of that poem, published as Transblanco in 1986, as well as Campos’ Galáxias, written from 1963 to 1976, are the main axes around which the book is organized.
The volume is divided into three parts. “Essays” unites seven texts by renowned scholars who focus on the relationship between the two authors, their impact and influence, and their cultural resonance by exploring explore the historical background and the different stylistic and cultural influences on the authors, ranging from Latin America and Europe to India and the U.S. The second section, “Remembrances,” collects four experiences of interaction with Haroldo de Campos in the process of transcreating Paz’s poem and working on Transblanco and Galáxias. In the last section, “Poems,” five poets of international standing--Jerome Rothenberg, Antonio Cicero, Keijiro Suga, André Vallias, and Charles Bernstein.
Paz and Campos, one from Mexico and the other from Brazil, were central figures in the literary history of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and beyond. Both poets signal the direction of poetry as that of translation, understood as the embodiment of otherness and of a poetic tradition that every new poem brings back as a Babel re-enacted.
This volume is a print corollary to and expansion of an international colloquium and poetic performance held at Stanford University in January 2010 and it offers a discussion of the role of poetry and translation from a global perspective. The collection holds great value for those interested in all aspects of literary translation and it enriches the ongoing debates on language, modernity, translation and the nature of the poetic object.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Introduction: A Multiversal Experiment
Part I: Essays
Chapter 1: On the Presence of Absence: Octavio Paz’s “Blanco”
Enrico Mario Santí
Chapter 2: “Blanco” and Transblanco: Modern and Post-Utopic
João Adolfo Hansen
Chapter 3: Refiguring the Poundian Ideogram: From Octavio Paz’s “Blanco/Branco” to Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias
Marjorie Perloff
Chapter 4: Poetry Makes Nothing Happen
Marília Librandi
Chapter 5: Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz and the Experience of the Avant-Garde
Antonio Cicero
Chapter 6: “Blanco”: a version of Mallarmé’s heritage
Luiz Costa Lima
Chapter 7: Translation and Radical Poetics: The Case of Octavio Paz and the Noigrandres
Odile Cisneros
Part 2: Remembrances
Chapter 8: Pages, Pageants, Portraits, Prospects: an Austin-atious Remembrance of Haroldo de Campos
Charles A. Perrone
Chapter 9: “Logopéia via Goethe via Christopher Middleton”: An unknown recording of Haroldo de Campos (Austin, 1981)
Kenneth David Jackson
Chapter 10: Meeting in Austin
Benedito Nunes
Part 3: Poems
Chapter 11: Three Variations on Octavio Paz’s “Blanco” and Fifteen Antiphonals for Haroldo de Campos, with a Note on Translation, Transcreation, and Othering
Jerome Rothenberg
Chapter 12: Poems
Antonio Cicero
Chapter 13: Waves of Absence
Keijiro Suga
Chapter 14: Hexaemeron. The Six Faces of Haphazard
André Vallias
Chapter 15: Amberianum [Philosophical Fragments of Caudio Amberian]
Charles Bernstein
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Notes on Contributors
Marília Librandi is a visiting professor of Brazilian studies at Princeton University. She taught in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, at Stanford University, from 2009 to 2018. She is the author of Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel and of Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura Brasileira.
Tom Winterbottom has published numerous articles and essays on Latin American culture, including his first book, A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro after 1889: Glorious Decadence. He teaches at Stanford University.
Jamille Pinheiro Dias holds a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of São Paulo, where she is currently a postdoctoral fellow. She was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University. As a translator, she worked with authors such as Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Alfred Gell.
